The Star Wars films helmed under the reign of George Lucas have mostly been epic pieces of masterworks tamed to the best of their abilities, especially the original trilogy. However, the prequel film series that followed wasn’t quite that well-received by fans and critics, especially the 1999 film Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
As it turns out, Lucas agrees as well. While the film itself went from a perfect piece to a total disappointment over time for fans, it has gone on to hold a somewhat similar position in the mastermind filmmaker’s heart as well. If anything, he himself admits that there are quite a few elements in the film that he went overboard with.
George Lucas Admits He Went Overboard With The Phantom Menace
Released in 1999, Episode I – The Phantom Menace kickstarted the prequel trilogy film series of George Lucas‘ SW franchise. However, its review went from brilliant to just okay to an absolute disappointment over time as viewers came to terms with how rushed the film was with some seriously corny bits of dialogue.
Surprisingly enough (or perhaps unsurprisingly), Lucas doesn’t disagree with this. As it turns out, the confusing, scampered, and pushed-in sequences of the movie didn’t fail to make even the genius brains behind it realize that this one wasn’t quite his finest work to date. To put it brutally honest, Lucas had gone overboard with this one.
In The Beginning: Making Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, he admitted to the same while sharing his perspective on the movie, saying (via Star Wars/YouTube):
[Episode I is] a little disjointed. It’s bold in terms of jerking people around, but I may have gone too far in a few places.
To be more precise, what was actually “disjointed” was him trying to push a lot of different scenes together, almost as though in a haste manner. As Ben Burtt, one of the editors, explained about one particularly complex climax scene from the movie:
In a space of about 90 seconds, you know, you go from lamenting the death of, you know, a hero, to escape, to slightly comedic with Jar Jar, to Anakin returning with his little kind of tag. It’s a lot, and really it’s in a very short time.
Of course, even Lucas realized just how disproportionate it all felt, considering how Burtt’s critique earned him an admitting groan from the director. But at the same time, despite knowing that it wouldn’t fit perfectly, Lucas still decided to go forward with the already prepared rough final cut for the film. Why? Well, because they just couldn’t cut anything.
George Lucas Eventually Decided On Living With His Original Decisions
Although he himself wanted to modify it a bit to make this particular climax scene a better version of itself, George Lucas just couldn’t. This was because he couldn’t re-write that entire sequence, not to mention then reshoot it all from scratch. That said, he decided that cleaning up the climax was but a practically feasible solution, with the final rough cut already been prepared.
As he continued to share his thought process and struggles during the same documentary:
It boggles the mind. I mean I’ve thought about this quite a bit, and the tricky part is you kind of can’t take any of those pieces out of there now. Because each one kind of takes you to the next place and you can’t jump because you don’t know where you are.
Comparing this particular film with the original movie, which was, needless to say, considerably a lot more simple than this one, the only thing Lucas had to say about it was that it was merely an “extreme” version of the original 1977 masterpiece. He said:
It’s stylistically designed to be that way, and you can’t undo that. But we can diminish the effects of it.
Well, while this does, directly, point out that Lucas more or less didn’t quite have a complete idea of what he was doing with this respective piece, at the same time, it is also worth noting that, instead of taking it all that seriously, fans can just “diminish the effects of it” — just like George Lucas did.
You can watch Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace on Disney+.
